


Gut-Shot Soldiers

by ElGato



Series: The Great War [3]
Category: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, DC Cinematic Universe, Justice League - All Media Types, Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: Gen, death is a lonely place, sort of, takes place during Justice League, until November dammit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-25
Updated: 2017-07-25
Packaged: 2018-12-06 15:09:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11603175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElGato/pseuds/ElGato
Summary: Clark Kent is among the dead, and woefully lost. The laws of the dead aren't as black and white as he thought.





	Gut-Shot Soldiers

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from the Sorne song entitled "Gun-Shot Soldiers". When I first played the song on Spotify the title was incorrectly labled as Gut-Shot Soldiers, and I found that title a bit more descriptive so I decided to use that title. Still, I recommend that song as it screams Justice League.

Clark Joseph Kent didn’t exactly have much an idea of an afterlife. Afterlife wasn’t on his mind when he speared Doomsday, before getting impaled himself on the monster’s giant bone claw.

He was raised in an area where Christian concepts of how life and death worked were so ingrained that he really couldn’t avoid conventional thought about heaven or hell. Still, that didn’t exactly mean he expected either when he would be buried.

All he knew is that it hurt. A lot. The words “ow ow ow ow” whirling through his brain as his world plummeted to darkness.

When he awoke--if you could call it waking up--he found himself in a field of still grass, surrounded by tall black trees. The sky was grey, the surroundings were dim. No light, no dark. And wherever he was it was disturbingly quiet.

Before he could adjust his body, mind, and eyes to the surroundings, he felt a nudge against his shoulder.

“Hey,” a voice called, sounding annoyed. “You awake now?”

Clark glanced up and to his side finding a man standing over him. He couldn’t quite piece together who this person was. He seemed human, but not. He looked like a man, two arms, two legs, flat chest, tall square head and jaw, but his skin looked grey.

The man was blond...or was. His rich hair was disheveled and matted so that the blond looked more of a brown. His beard dark with grey at the tips. He wore a discolored white over shirt, unbuttoned to reveal a stained undershirt. His sturdy dark grey slacks were held up by suspenders.

A lot about this man seemed as lifeless and monotone as the world around him. Except for markings Clark spotted along his forearms, the top of his chest, and his neck. And his eyes. Unblinking bright blue eyes that seemed to look through things, rather than at them.

The man straightened giving Clark a rather patient look. Perhaps a bit bemused. “You can walk, yes?”

Clark exhaled and sat himself up, “Yes. I can.”

“Then if you want to get out of the middle of nowhere, follow me.”

As Clark stood, he took the time to notice his own clothing. It wasn’t the suit he died in. And he hoped this wasn’t what he was buried in. Just a long sleeved white shirt and dark jeans.

This man walked ahead in a direction and Clark followed, a million questions on his lips but unable to ask them with every gasping breath he took. After what seemed like hours, Clark knowing that the whole way was endless forest, they came upon a cabin. Small, but comforting looking.

“Here. C’mon,” the man said with a wave of his hand.

“What is this place?” Clark managed to ask as he stepped into the cabin. Inside was a bit cluttered, mostly paraphernalia littered on the walls. Military paraphernalia. Spiritual paraphernalia. Knick knacks and thingamabobs.  


The man passed an eerie looking staff on the wall behind a well worn, plaid patterned lazy chair.

“Come in,” he said in a tone that made it really sound like it wasn’t an option.

Clark walked in sheepishly, nervously sitting in a slightly less used leather chair across from the small table next to the man’s chair. It was in the lightest part of the room, next to a warm roaring fire in a simple brick fireplace.

“Are you not going to answer me? Who are you?” Clark asked, rubbing his hands along his knees.   


As he was speaking, the mysterious man reached down by the side of his cozy chair. He stuffed what looked to be tobacco in a wooden pipe. He struck a match and lit it.

Silence settled, and then...

“Steve Trevor is the name I was given. Former captain, former spy, former pilot, former fur trader for the Wayne & Kord Trading Company, former sea man of a Mr. Lemuel Tugboat*, former choir boy with a bullshit Christian name. After St. Stephen, the Protomartyr, first guy to let himself be offed for the sake of God’s word. Or  _ a _ god’s word. The coincidence isn't lost on me...in hindsight.”

He laughed grimly and in a way that made Clark uncomfortable.

“But the few people I’ve had to encounter here since I came here….they call me Charon. Not sure if that’s how that’s really pronounced. They’ve said ‘ _ karon’ ‘cha-ron’  _ and my favorite ‘ _ Sharon _ ’.”

“So I am dead,” Clark said nearly under his breath.

“You are.”

“How are you and I the only ones here. Shouldn't others, as you said, be here to?”

“You’re lost Clark Kent. Sorry pal. The afterlife doesn’t have much in the way of roadmaps. Better than purgatory, maybe. Wherever that is. You’re lost just like me. I’m dead just like you. Normal dude who just did as everyone does eventually.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Limbo? I’m a suicide. Yup, either hanged*** or blew myself up in a plane along with one hundred kilos of weaponized gas. Can’t remember. But it’s one of the two.” He relit his pipe, smoke whirling around his face pouring from his nose and mouth as he slowly exhaled. “I remember no one heard me when I fell.”

Clark frowned looking confused. He supposed he shouldn’t question the politics of the afterlife. Nor the ramblings of a man probably several years dead. Who knows what those years dead do to a spirit’s mind.

Steve reached inside his overshirt and pulled out a yellowed deck of cards, “Not that it matters in the grand scheme of things. Cards? I find nothing helps chew the fat better than a good ole’ game of poker.”

Clark wasn’t exactly in the mood, but if it could help him get more information out of Steve--or Charon--then maybe it couldn’t hurt. After all. He was dead too. It wasn’t like he had anything better to do.

Then Clark thought of the way he died. He knew he would die charging at Doomsday. Did that count? Is that why he’s here. “Would I be considered a suicide then? Would you know?”

“Don’t know,” Steve said. “Those who were once in charge of this...place, Tartus, are long dead. Hades is gone apparently, or the devil--who knows, and there’s no King Minos** to judge me on my decisions nor yours. So here I am for eternity I expect. And those who lived less complicated lives, and had less complicated deaths jump straight in line to the pool of souls.”

Clark shuffled the deck, using the bridge method as his mother had taught him when she taught him how to play Canasta.

“That pool, you know, used to be glistening white, filled with only good souls to swim in peace,” Steve shrugged, sounding nostalgic. “Now with less entities to enforce quality control, the pool is a kind of….grey. A blend of bad and good souls as well as everything in between.”

He ashed his pipe in his ashtray---was it made from a skull? Clark couldn’t tell.

“But suicides, friend. That’s touchy. It’s like the cosmic forces only values your afterlife as much as you value your own life.”

“That’s not really a Greek belief is it? Reservations for those who take their own lives?” Clark dealt the cards, watching the man in front of him shake his head vigorously, “Yeah so, that’s my Catholic upbringing, can’t exactly alter the way how I was raised to believe the afterlife works. Then again, at the last moments of my life, I didn’t exactly know what to believe.”

Steve picked up his hand of cards, “Can’t exactly describe how the afterlife works, Clark Kent. It’s a giant mess. A lonely mess often times. Lucky for you for my sacrifice I was given the golden opportunity to be the schmuck who gets coral lost souls like you. Gods do love their sacrifices to remain as such.”

Clark rearranged his hand and asked shyly, “Those markings? Were they on you before death?”

Steve tore his eyes away from his head and looked at the marking on his arms. “These? Everyone has these.”

He closed his hand and pointed to a point on Clark’s chest, “You have one.”

Clark’s brow furrowed and glanced down on his chest. He then pulled out the collar of his shirt. There, right where it would be if he was in his suit, was his Kryptonian coat of arms etched red and fresh into his flesh--and yet he felt no pain. Even in death, he could not escape his origins.

“Most I suppose represent the journeys an individual has taken," Steve replied looking at symbol that looked like a highly stylized eagle on his wrist.  


Clark’s eyes roamed along the lines and symbols on Steve, wondering how much of it were individual achievements and moments.

“No need to envy my amount of marks,” Steve laughed. “Generally the better people who come around here have less, and the worse have more. But I’m not picky about company.”

The bitterness wasn’t lost on Clark. One could only imagine what it would be like to live in such a dreary isolated world on their own with only the company of a dead person here and there to to drive away the loneliness until he had to send them on their way.

But this Steve Trevor character seemed to thrive on being self-deprecating, with every amount of bitterness met with an air of acceptance. It was his job now, to roam locked into this corner of the afterlife. But despite the dreariness of the grey world outside, it was quiet, homey, peaceful. Like the cosmic ideal of peace is to be absolutely lonely. A metaphysical Fortress of Solitude.

“Gin,” Trevor said laying his hand down. He had Gin. However…

“I thought we were playing poker,” Clark asked, looking confusedly at the hand placed in front of him.

Trevor paused, his blue eyes cast upward in thought.

“Shit, you’re right. It was poker,” he leaned back, gathering the cards back into his hand. He shuffled, but only a few cards behind slipped on top of one another repeatedly. “Strange game, gin. It’s a lot about trading and giving up on things. You trade for the cards you want, and you pray for what you need, but rarely do you feel you get a hand that you deserve.”

He began dealing. “But I’m sure I found something that I wasn’t supposed to deserve. A woman. A goddess.”

Clark listened, noting with curiosity how Steve’s voice changed as he spoke.

“Because despite what the world --in a war--brought to her, she still thought the best in us. The best in me. You don’t meet people like that very often.”

“Yeah,” said Clark picking up his own hand again, mind drifting to all he remembered. Lois. His world. “When you meet someone like that, dying to potentially help them doesn’t seem that bad. Playing cards isn’t bad. Myself, I got impaled by a monster. I know that sounds weird but that's what it was. I threw myself at him. I had to kill him and the only way was to get too close. But Lois, my...."  


Clark paused, remembering the ring he ordered and his intention. Now he didn't have to chance to ever be in a world where he could call Lois his wife.

"She was my world you know. If I didn't die, she and countless others would. I rather spend my death thinking about the world with Lois in it, than live in the world without her."

For once, Steve didn’t immediately reply back with some depressing philosophy about personal choices and death. Instead he angled his body slightly away, eyes looking lost in thought as he watched the smoke of his pipe swirl up and make translucent shapes.

“I suppose can relate, Clark Kent. I had thought the same when I…” he made a slicing motion over his own throat with his pipe, the smoke from the pipe lingering on the invisible wound. Then, his voice softened as he sighed and lamented. “I do not know if she has ever found peace. I wish I could know.”

_ She  _ being this mysterious woman that no doubt impacted Steve Trevor to choose the course he did at the end of his life.

“What are we playing for?” Clark asked, wondering if he should take the rather pitiable hand he was dealt seriously. He sighed feeling the uncertainty of his companion and this cabin lift. All there was now was cards.  


His opponent tapped his folded cards sharply on the table. 

“Your life,” Steve gave him a knowing smirk.

Clark straightened in his chair. He was sure, his heart--if he still had one--leapt. “You mean…”

“Send you back,” Steve refanned his cards back in his hands. “You’re lost, as I said. My job is to help you through this place, as I said.”

“But surely you can’t defy the rules of death. Right?” Clark hoped he was right. “Would you really have the capabilities? Or the permission?”

Jonathan Kent always used to over use the phrase, “Only death and taxes are sure things, Clark.”

Maybe it wasn’t as sure as his father once said.

“I’ve made a lot of decisions I regret in life. I haven’t much opportunity to make any regrettable decisions in death. But whether I regret this or not is wholly up to you, Clark Kent.”

Steve gave him a pointed look, before leaning back in his chair his disarming grin still on his face. He gestured to the table in front of them, "Your call."

 

Once again, in the void of the darkness, he felt his body be nudged.

“Wake up, Clark Kent.”

Clark jerked awake, finding himself in the darkness of the unlit cabin, curled on the ground next to his chair, cards strewn all over the chair and the ground. He glanced up feeling the sharp tap at his shoulder again. Steve Trevor was standing over him, looking ethereal, primal, naked except for a strap of leather tied across his groin, holding a staff made of black wood (at least he thought it was wood) with other bones and horns and odds and ends tied to it near the top.   
  
Without the candlelight, Steve’s skin looked grey from the lifeless light pouring in from the outside. But the markings and tattoos that littered his body glowed a subtle turquoise, like magical runes carved into flesh.

His eyes. His eyes were piercing before, but the blue of them now were flames. Softly flickering literal blue flames. Clark couldn’t tear his own eyes away from them.

“Come,” he said in a low voice and Clark made the move to follow.

The forest wasn't anymore distinguishable than it was before, and yet Steve seemed to know he was going. If he was Steve. He seemed stiffer, more impersonal as he guided Clark. Perhaps it was the invincibility he had. Despite being naked he was stepping and running into sharp sticks and twigs without flinching.

Clark still wasn't sure. "Are you really going to send me back? How is that possible?"

Without breaking stride, Steve answered, "There's nothing to say the afterlife doesn't make clerical errors---pardon the pun there. You yourself said you sacrificed yourself to save the world. Perhaps I can fudge a few numbers for the sake of a martyr."

"If I can go back. Why can't you? You don't belong in limbo anymore than I do. I died to save Lois, my world, the world she lived in. Just as you died for your...goddess."

Steve whipped around, his blue fire eyes blazing, as he cried, “I did NOT do it for her!”

Clark nearly stumbled back, unaware that he was going to offend his guide.

“I did it for time,” his voice lowered, but held a growling edge. “I did it so SHE could save the world. And if she needs your help to save it from this...invasion…”

He reached out and grabbed Clark’s wrist his touch cold, but not unpleasantly so, “...then I intend to do my damnedest to give it to her.”

Before he could ask what he meant by this strange girl he spoke of stopping a  _ current _ invasion, Clark was pulled to the ground, with a particularly strong jerk.

“Kneel, Clark Kent,” Steve’s voice boomed unexpectedly. The grip on his black staff tightened as he lifted it up.

“Wait...how is this going to send me back?” Clark asked, searching for logic in this very illogical situation.  


“Simple. I bash your brains out.”

“...w-what…” Clark’s normally strong voice was too weak for even him to recognize.

Steve lifted the staff, Clark the spiked and horn top in horror.  


“But this makes no sense,” Clark tried hard not to hide his panic.

“Son, when you live long enough and die long enough you begin to realize that to play death’s game you can’t make a lick of sense.”

Clark thought maybe his special powers can prevent this. Can prevent the pain Trevor would inflict on him. Or at the very least stop this....stupidity.

“What’s to be afraid for? You’re already dead.”

“Yes, yes I know that,” he replied. “But I’m not so sure it won’t be painful.”

Steve stopped, staying his staff. “Hrmm...never thought of that.” He paused and shrugged. “Oh well.”

Before Clark could respond, the staff came down square upon his head.

 

He struggled to breathe, hearing his racing heart thrum in his ears. A sweet sound. And yet all the more terrifying as he found himself enclosed. Of course he was. He was buried wasn’t he? He pounded on the lid of his own coffin, feeling a little give. It wasn’t his strength, his time under ground made it impossible for the yellow sun to recharge him. No, the earth was still fresh. He hadn’t been dead long.

He calmed down, sucking in one suffocating breath and pounded. The lid of the coffin of course was enameled. No pine boxes for farm boy Clark Kent. He was given a proper burial. And Clark kind of wished he wasn’t at this point in time.

Then something blinded him. Crumbles of dirt were peeking through the cracks of his coffin. More give. A charge deep in his chest. He spotted a grass root. UV light can reach. A small amount but enough to…

Suddenly he didn’t feel like he was suffocating, but he didn’t know how long this rush of adrenaline would last. He shook the lid, trying stick his fingers in the tougher, more compacted dirt that walled all sides of his rather loosely filled coffin. He the hardened ground to pull himself out of his soil flooded grave, gasping as light and air hit him. He coughed as dirt and soul filled his lungs but it felt so good to breathe air. Real living air. In a world full of shades and color. Not grey.

Taking gasping breathes that almost seemed like a cry he shook the dirt off himself, noting how stiff and unused his limbs felt.

Tearing open the dusty bug eaten suit coat and undershirt, Clark saw his own death mark, his Kryptonian symbol slowly begin to fade into his skin. With each fresh beat of his heart the mark became fainter and fainter until it wasn’t seen on his flesh again.

Clark gave out a short laughter of relief and awe.  _ He did it. He really sent me back.  _ It was then he realized he was close to weeping in relief. He was alive. He could see Lois again. He could...help again.

He breathed in the rural Kansas air, fresh with a hint of manure, grassy and rich. It felt good to smell. It felt good to...walk. He stumbled a few times as his muscles were slowly easing from their time in rigor, but once he found his footing he was half tempted to fly right then.

He held himself back, no matter how much he wanted to race down the hill to his farm house and embrace his mother.

He glanced around, almost half expecting Steve Trevor to be there with him. He expected to hear some sarcastic, charming, gallows humor comment on the current state of the living world as it was.

But, who or whatever Steve Trevor was, he wasn’t there. He wasn’t among the living. He was where he was supposed to be, among the lonesome fields of death, being his own King Minos, watching over lost wandering souls like a disgruntled but comforting ghost.

Smiling to himself, Clark said, almost as if he answered the very question of why he was sent back to life. “So I can watch over the living.”

**Author's Note:**

> *In the older comics, when he was young Steve was a sailor under Lemuel Tugboat to help support his family. I imagine DCEU Steve to be a lot like a traditional Western American hero, like Sam Huston or Hugh Glass. So him being a sailor (+canonical) seems to fit his movie character very much.
> 
> **King Minos is an entity derived from Dante's Inferno. He awaits near the entrance of hell and judges which level each soul would go.
> 
> *** See my story Hanging by a Golden Thread. Also Flashpoint reference.


End file.
